June 2020: RPS gender pay gap
Over the past two years RPS have been measuring our gender pay gap and reporting on a voluntary basis in accordance with the same criteria used by larger organisations that are legally obliged to report this.
We began publishing our figures in April 2019, with data from the previous year. With our 2020 figures now being published, we can look for patterns over time to see how we’ve progressed and to gain a fuller understanding of what actions are effective in addressing our pay gap.
Our minimum aspiration is that our pay gap is below the national average, which itself is decreasing over time. We’ve achieved this consistently by at least two to three percentage points since we started reporting.
However, our median pay gap has increased over the last two years and that’s a cause for concern.
We know that some of this fluctuation stems from the small number of men employed at RPS – 77 of 209 employees - so that even one male appointment at senior level could affect male median pay by one or two percent.
However, we’re not satisfied with the current position and are committed to improving it.
In our 2019 and 2020 pay reviews we used external pay benchmarking to uplift salaries that were assessed as below a reasonable market range. Although this was initially a gender neutral exercise it’s had a positive impact on the female/male pay ratios.
We’re happy that we’ve reduced the over-representation of women in the lowest pay quartile from 12.3 to 2.2 % over the last two years and we’re committed to continuing that progress.
Action to address the pay gap
We recognise that there are many complex factors that contribute to the gender pay gap, including external labour market factors that we can’t influence directly. We’re working on a range of actions to improve women’s pay position over time.
One thing we’ve started doing is using a gender decoding tool to check that the language we’re using in job adverts is gender neutral and doesn’t discourage women from applying for senior roles or for roles in any areas of the organisation where they may be under-represented. This applies in the same way to more junior roles in the organisation where men are under-represented, so that we achieve a more even gender balance at all levels.
We’ll also be reviewing our recruitment processes more broadly to ensure that we’ve done everything we can to be fair and inclusive, to eliminate any potential bias across all our recruitment and to encourage greater representation of women in more highly paid roles.
We’ll continue to use pay benchmarking to ensure we address any low pay issues or salary disparities.
We’ll be working on our more detailed action plans in the course of this year with the involvement and support of our Inclusion and Diversity Group, the Employee Forum and colleagues across RPS.
Breakdown of RPS gender pay gap at 5 April 2020
The charts below show the breakdown of our pay gap and proportions of female/male representation at all levels within RPS.
To interpret the figures below, it’s important to remember that we are not dealing with large numbers of employees so percentages can be misleading. We have 209 employees in total, 132 are female and 77 are male. One man represents 1.3% of our total male population.
All charts below should be looked at considering the percentage representation of each employee group in the whole organisation. We employ approximately 63% women and 37% men.
If both groups reached the top salary levels in the same proportions, we could expect to see about six women and four men in our top ten posts.